There were two cars, belonging to Jax and Flynn, driving from the beach north up through town to someone’s parentless house. Riding with Jax was Seger, and with Flynn, Xavier. On a stretch of road by one of the town’s country clubs, Jax lost control of his car, hit a telephone pole, and skidded a hundred feet into a tree. The crash drove the engine through the dashboard. The Jaws of Life were required to cut the bodies from the wreckage.
At that moment—as the first siren sounded, as the first numbers were dialed, as the bodies were gathered and rushed away—I was watching a movie/eating Chinese/on a bed with my girlfriend, I can’t remember exactly. Lost in the oblivious haze of youth, I was certain, like millions of teenagers before me, that nothing would ever touch us there.
Until, of course, it did.
By now, Corden has surprised himself. He too had his doubts about whether he was ready to host a late-night talk show. Now he does not.
“In many respects, it’s the dream job for me,” he says.
Because late-night TV plays to your strengths?
“I don’t know if it’s playing to my strengths,” Corden says drily. “It’s more like ignoring my weaknesses.”
Who the &%!#@ is James Corden?
Fox News may have been surprised by the allegations, as were many close to Simmons, but doubts about his background had percolated for years within Clizbe’s social network of ex-spooks, and they began in earnest at that fateful lunch in 2010. As Clizbe drove home, his thoughts drifted to a passage from George MacDonald Fraser’s 1969 novel ‘‘Flashman,’’ about a wealthy misfit who, because of a series of misunderstandings, earns a reputation as a war hero. It opens on the fraudulent narrator considering a portrait of himself: ‘‘I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer . . . tall, masterful and roughly handsome . . . and say that it is the portrait of a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward — and, oh yes, a toady.’’